Both Wilcox and Kearney are correct that marriage, in the decades that it has been increasingly optional, has become the purview of the wealthy. It is an institution that allows the already economically stable to become even more stable by combining their resources. Marriage, once a narrow entrance into adulthood, now more frequently serves as a rewarding capstone life event, agreed to by two well-resourced people who have the advantages of sexual liberation, educational attainment, professional achievement, and economic security under their belt as well as the freedom to exit their unions should they turn out to be unsatisfying.
But where Kearney and Wilcox are wrong — incredibly, monumentally wrong — is that the solution to this structural inequity is simply encouraging more marriage for more people. They confuse cause and effect and are incorrect in the claim that marital privilege is the cause of the inequity rather than a further symptom of it.
Exploring the Peltzman study in her Atlantic article this past summer, Olga Khazan noted that one line of thinking suggests it’s not that marriage makes people happy; it’s that happy people are more likely to get married. I’d add that because marriage is no longer obligatory, it’s often entered into for happy reasons — that you are in love with a person who seems to be a good fit — and not because, say, you are young and pregnant and your community demands it.
It’s easy to see why the marriage solution is so appealing. Like telling people that it’s their responsibility to address the climate crisis by using paper straws, or advising Black men that they need to pull up their pants and be better fathers, it off-loads the responsibility for broad and systemic reform by tsk-tskingly placing it on individuals and their intimate behaviors.
That's not just a masculine thing, either. Women also rebel at the notion that they're somehow dead weight in a relationship or otherwise detrimental to their partner's well-being. My smattering of unmarried friends are consistently having conversations about their dating life in which they express some mix of inadequacy and disappointment in the income disparity between them and their current partners. Gender has far less to do with it than "Traditonalist" conservatives would have you believe.
There are some very real and immediate economies of scale in having a partner (or even just a roommate) when you're both on the same page in terms of chores and household maintenance and meal schedules and tastes in entertainment. Everything from dinner to vacation becomes marginally cheaper and easier when you're working as a team. You make fewer mistakes and suffer fewer "I'm too burned out to do this" setbacks, particularly when your partner is more knowledgeable and motivated on the subject.
It isn't even just "two people living in a bedroom is cheaper than one" but a real benefit to people with overlapping hobbies and interests who genuinely like one another providing all sorts of physical and emotional supports that wouldn't exist if they were alone. If absolutely nothing else, its easier to move furniture or cook a good meal for two people rather than one. Pet ownership is so much easier, too. And who doesn't want a furry friend in their lives?
I think what kinda gets overlooked in the "marriage is good for people" thing is that it isn't just marriage. Large extended families and communal households are better for people. You don't have to stop at two. The math only gets better if its a thruple. A greek house is incredibly efficient relative to some number of single 20-something college kids living alone, which is one reason why they can get such good grades while still having all that time and money left over to party.
Large groups of people working in concert towards a higher quality of life produce more comfortable living conditions than alienated and isolated individuals.
I am more tempted to compare the idealized experience of family life to a pre-modern tribe or village. It isn't just two people living in partnership that's idealized. Its this theory of a sprawling interconnected family - siblings and children and grandparents and cousins, all socializing together and supporting one another. Marriage is the means by which these households expand and the web of community solidifies itself.
So much of what is missing from the modern equation is that underlying foundation. Because we're so much more migratory, because we don't have any real claim to the property that should have been our birthright, and because we have these much smaller and more scattered family trees, we never get the benefits of large extended family households that pre-industrial communities enjoyed.
Marriage is reduced to two individual people joining together, rather than two families intermingling. And that is far less appealing, with fewer economic knock-on benefits, even before you consider the deprivations of modern wage-slavery and debt peonage that plague the lower classes.